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Processes of Radicalisation: Foreign Fighters from Western Europe Who Fought for Islamic State
Truchlá, Jana ; Bureš, Oldřich (advisor) ; Nocheva, Nikolena Hristova (referee)
The awareness that the threat of terrorism is no longer linked only to the Middle East, but has home-grown nature and arisen from young people living on European soil, alarmed the public and subsequently provoked increased interest in radicalisation research. 9/11 or the European terrorist attacks in London or Madrid have led to the increasing media attention of the phenomenon of radicalisation occurring among young European Muslims. At the beginning of the new millennium, the threat stemming from terrorism embodied one of the most urgent security challenges, whether for politicians or scholars. The academic and political interest in research into factors that increase the risk of radicalisation to violent extremism has ended up in many efforts to grasp and properly define radicalisation, or to outline the expected pathways of radicalisation (Veldhuis, 2009: 1). In my thesis, I build on these efforts of prominent experts and I examine the effect of the factors contributing to violent radicalisation like social networks, dissatisfaction with current reality, moral outrage, family and individual characteristics including criminal backgrounds. I look at the impact of these factors in case studies of three Western European countries - Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. Except discussing specific...
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Imperial Nostalgia? The Presence of Imperial Past in the Conservatives' Discourse on Global Britain
Stoláriková, Lenka ; Váška, Jan (advisor) ; Kasáková, Zuzana (referee)
This master's thesis deals with the British political Conservative discourse on Global Britain in the years 2016-2020 and the United Kingdom's place in the post-Brexit world. After the unexpected results of the EU referendum, the British government introduced the concept of Global Britain as their new foreign policy orientation. This paper assumes that the idea of the UK opened to the whole world and embracing old friends and new allies alike is built upon the imperial nostalgia and the idealisation of their past. It focuses on the various ways in which nostalgia manifests itself in the Conservative discourse of 2016-2020, specifically in the public speeches of its key representatives and election programs. In the theoretical part, this paper explores the academic debate on Global Britain and the role of history in the post-Brexit world. It uses the memory studies and operationalisation of the concept of nostalgia as a framework for the source analysis. The empirical chapter presents the research results in two ways - based on the thematic categories and individual speakers. The former follows the various ways in which the nostalgic manifestations are used to create a vision of a post-Brexit global Britain, while the latter focuses on the individual approaches in the efforts to communicate that image.
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Bipolarization of the society? Analysing online media debate on immigration
Hrdina, Jakub ; Karásek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Kuľková, Miroslava (referee)
This thesis explores the UK's media environment and aims to decide whether the media show bipolar trends in reporting about immigration during the infamous EU immigration crisis. It utilizes the Natural Language Processing AI to assess a dataset of five major publishers in the UK - The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph - through the years 2015, 2016 and 2017. The focus of the analysis are the dynamics of the media space in general as well as specifics of reporting of separate publishers. The applied method is a novelty to quantitative assessment of qualitative aspects of given texts and the thesis serves as an example of successful utilization of such approach. In comparison to the previous researches conducted on similar topics, the main benefits of utilization of the AI includes the ability to assess huge datasets, assured consistency and huge innovative potential. Being able to analyze a dataset of 1813 articles quantitatively, the method is as important as the study itself.
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